As with all original examples, Julia's post provides a lot of legal detail, which I reshare here for this item, because you may initially think this is just about news from newspapers, but here too, wording matters:

And while I have argued a long time ago, that there are many kinds of blogging (it's just a medium, like paper), many can certainly be considered of journalistic nature. In fact, some even use their blog for getting press tickets for scientific conferences (but that's another story ;).

Well, if you are still reading this series, maybe it is time to head over to the savethelink.org website.

OK, after moving to the second example, I realized the subtle difference with the first: I got example 01 and 02 mixed up, and while the previous post was really discussing Julia's second example. Example 01 is really about snippets of publications, like quotes. Now, before you argue that quoting is legal, realize that depends on specifics in various jurisdictions, and, as Julia writes:

"[..] in many EU countries, sharing an extract without further commenting on its substance is not covered by that exception".

So, I hope this post provides enough commenting and substance. But that clearly does not apply for modern way of dissemination of science via Twitter.

01. Sharing what happened 20 years ago

Anyway, now I got a kickstart for the first example too: both tweets were actually about news of close to twenty years ago: bothpublications are of about 20 years ago! So, take the first tweet with the title of the Nature News article, but now with a quote.

This will be illegal for commercial entities, and possible me too: there is no significant commenting. It practically means that covering the news of the past will be practically illegal or very hard at least, or at least to some, where some is ill-defined, because of the proposal is very unclear about who can and who cannot.

Oh, and if you're not already freaked out: it's retroactive. That is, happy cleaning up the past 20 years of dissemination you did and figure out where this example applied. Nice excuse to not do research!

Wednesday, December 28, 2016

OK, let me first say that I hope Julia Reda does not consider herself a publisher. If you did not get the above joke, then continue reading.

This post is an attempt to translate the proposed copyright laws to, well, research. The choice of words is critical here. I deliberately did not say: academic, university, scholarly. I hope my hesitation will become more clear after reading this post too. I am not a lawyer (IANAL), but it is also important to realize that the exact meaning of law often only becomes clear when tried in court, where judges will create de facto examples of what really is allowed and not, following the intention of the law. I am a researcher and a teacher. I implement this by being a strong proponent of Open Science.

This post is about proposed clean up of the European copyright situation, or so it was meant to be. The practice shows differently, unfortunately. The problem is what I see happen around me (and wrote about it and speak about it). I see a huge gap with how the previous generation of scholars think about research dissemination and copyright, and how the modern society sees this. And having read more about it than I should as a scientist, I cannot undo seeing all the contradictions there are in there.

This post will, therefore, take the 10 example activities that will soon be illegal, if we vote badly in upcoming elections and don't follow Julia's knowledge, as a starting point to highlight some of the problems I expect that will happen, based on observations in doing research in the European Community.

Before I start off, one more disclaimer. The proposal is not hard to read, but like other legal works, uses a specific language. Words that have a common or scientific meaning may have a different meaning in law. So, when this post talks about a "hyperlink", I may get the legal meaning wrong. I strongly rely here on more legally knowledgeable people, like Julia. But as she also indicated in her #33C3 talk, legal definitions can be tweaked by newer laws. Two terms that are critical here which are not well-defined (IMHO), but central in the proposal are: commercial (see e.g. Breaking News: CC-NC only for personal use!) and publisher. But that's part of the problem with this proposal.

Finally, what is critical, we must not let ourselves be deluded: law only exists as a formal way to agree on things. Increasingly, very sadly, it is being used to force people into criminality.

02.a Tweeting a creative news headline

I will actually split this up into two examples, one which will be illegal, the other also, but depending on how far the term "publisher" extends. That is, are press outlets the only intended copyright holders here, or also scientific journal publishers.

WTF? Ho, ho, ho... you're not saying that tweeting the title of an article is illegal???

Actually, yes, that's exactly what this proposal is saying. So, let me continue. If Twitter does not pay Springer+Nature for the right to tweet this, I may have to. May, because it depends on a court to formally decide if I am commercial or not, if I ever get challenged.

It's weird, isn't it? I'm making free advertisement here, and I may need to pay money to do have to right to advertise that.

However, and this is also critical, commercial entities need to apply. Some argue that some universities are commercial, what about SMEs? What about H2020 projects, where often a significant part of the project are SMEs? Are they commercial? Can a project like eNanoMapper still make such tweets, or would that be illegal? Who knows, but even if probably not, will they take the risk? Can they afford to? How much will it cost to make a decision? They will likely not bother and just not do it, inhibiting scholarly dissemination.

02.b Tweeting a creative news headline

Well, OK, I cannot copy/paste the title of the article and still do the advertisement. But I stress that this practice is very common among scholars; it's one of the foundations of #altmetrics.

Now, the above example used Nature News, but what about Nature itself? Or Cell by Elsevier? This is where my legal knowledge fails. At this moment I am not sure if scholarly journals are the rights owners in mind in this proposal, but I currently doubt that the owners and legal departments of the big scientific publishers will say so differently.

So, will the next tweet still be legal?

I honestly do not know, but my current guess is this will be illegal for commercial entities.

OK, to not make this post too long, I will save the next example for a next post. To be continued!

Friday, December 23, 2016

I was recently asked my experiences around data sharing, and in particularly the legal aspects of it. Because whether we like it or not (I think "we" generally do not like it and I see many scholars ignore it), society has an impact on scholarly research. Particularly, copyright and intellectual property (IP) laws make research increasingly expensive. I wrote up the following aspects related to that discussion. I am not a lawyer, and these laws are different in each country (think about facts, governmental output, etc). Your mileage may vary.

#1 Don't give away your copyright to any single other party

Scholars are common to this. For a very long time we would freely give our research IP to publishers. By selling that IP, publishers would fund the knowledge dissemination (often with huge profits). But institutes start thinking about this, and are backtracking on it. Bottom line: do not give away your copyright.

The importance of this is that you will loose all control over the data. You will no longer be able to give your data to others, because it is no longer yours. Also, you can never repurpose the data anymore, because it is no longer yours. Instead, give other rights to work with the data, by removing copyright or by giving people a suitable license (see the next point).

#2 The three pillars of Open: the rights to (re)use, modify, and redistribute

Really, these three points are critical: it gives anyone the rights to work with the data.

(Re)use is clear.

The right to modify is critical because it is needed for changing the format in which the data is shared (e.g. create ISATab-Nano) but also for data curation!

Redistribute is the right that anyone needs to make your data available to others. In fact, all those EULAs (end-user license agreements) that all of us sign when creating an online account give Google, Facebook, etc, etc the right to reshare (some of) the data you share with them. Clearly, without this right, ECHA, eNanoMapper, CEINT, etc cannot reshare the data with others.

#3 Copyright

Copyright law around data is very complex. For example, there are huge differences between law in European countries and in the USA. The latter, for example, have the concept of "public domain" that many European countries do not have (though we still happily use that term here too). In Europe, databases have database rights. Facts are excluded, but I have yet to find a clear statement of what a "fact" is. But a collection of facts is the outcome of a creative process (like any EC FP7 or H2020 project) and hence has copyright.

For starting projects, the consortium agreement (CA) defines how this is dealt. And like you can give the copyright of a research paper to a publisher, a CA can define that all partners of a project have shared IP. That ensures they can all use it, but it also means it becomes really hard to share it outside the consortium. Instead, my recommendation is to keep the IP with the data creator, and make it available within the consortium with a license. Or just waive the copyright. Copyright with one legal department can already be complicated, and if you have multiple legal departments discussing IP, it certainly does not become easier.

Of course, consensus among all partners is best. I also stress that laws are just tools. Any partner can give others more rights without problems. They cannot hide behind laws. Ideally, each project proposal writing starts with a formal consensus how data will be available. Solve that before you get the money. But I will write more about that later during these holidays.

#4 Licenses and waivers

The open source community realized these issues decades ago. First with source code, leading to Open Source Initiative (OSI)-approved licenses, providing the aforementioned rights. For source code, there are also so-called waivers. The difference with licenses is that the latter gives you specific rights, while a waiver "waves" away any rights any law (from any jurisdiction) might automatically give. For the three "pillars" the outcome is the same: you will have those three rights. In case of a waiver, you just get any right you can think of too, whereas a license is limited to those rights specified in the license.

Now, these ideas developed in the open source community found their way to the "Open Access" (OA, for documents) community and the "Open Data" community in the last 10 years. Some lobbying forces managed to clutter the definition of Open Access, which is why the community talks about green OA and gold OA. The first is not really Open and does not give you all three rights. Gold Open Access does. A green OA article you cannot reshare.

For data there are basically two options:

licenses: Creative Commons (CC) license

waiver: CCZero (not a licence)

For the first option, the licenses, the CC licenses come in various flavors, and this is implemented with "clauses". For example, there is an "attribution" clause. This creates the CC-BY license as you know from gold Open Access journals. This clause gives you the three rights, but also requires you to cite where you got the data.

A second CC clause is the ND (No Derivative) clause, which defines that no one can make derived products. Effectively, it removes on of the three rights. It exists with the idea that some things are not meant to change. Think for example about the JRCNMxxxx codes for nanomaterials. No one should be changing them, because it would defy the purpose of the definition of those codes.

A third CC clause is the NC (Non-Commercial) clause. This clause specifies that you can only use that data for non-commercial purposes. Some publishers use that in their implementation of "Open Access" and basically says that only some people get the three basic rights. Now, who "some" is, is not clearly defined. Not legally, not practically. No one really knows when something is commercial and when not. Some legal experts have argued that some American universities are commercial enterprises (source needed). For Europe SME's are a clearly commercial entity.

A final CC clause is the SA (Share Alike) clause, which requires that people redistributing your data also make it available under the same license. This is in the open source community referred to as "copylefting" and has upsides and downsides.

I stress that in case of licenses, no IP is reassigned and the producers of the data keep owner of the IP.

At a recent NanoSafety Cluster meeting I gave a presentation about these matters and the slides are available here.

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This blog deals with chemblaics in the broader sense. Chemblaics (pronounced chem-bla-ics) is the science that uses computers to solve problems in chemistry, biochemistry and related fields. The big difference between chemblaics and areas such as chem(o)?informatics, chemometrics, computational chemistry, etc, is that chemblaics only uses open source software, open data, and open standards, making experimental results reproducible and validatable. And this is a big difference!

About Me

Assistant professor at the Dept of Bioinformatics - BiGCaT at NUTRIM, Maastricht University, studying biology at an unsupervised and atomic level. Open Science is my main hobby resulting in participation in, among many others, Bioclipse, CDK and WikiPathways. ORCID:0000-0001-7542-0286. Posts on G+ are personal.

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